I’m a 20-year-old male whose life is a living hell. I can start back when I was younger at about age 7 my dad died and left me with a family of 3 girls. By 16 I was over my dads death but still was being raised by a women when I needed a man. I constantly fought with my mother so my older sister was somewhat a parent figure that I could trust. She died when I was 16 in a car crash and left me with my mom and younger sister who I both fight with all the time. I started using drugs and became addicted to many different things, my addiction lead me to about 6 arrests for everything from fighting to drug use to stealing. The only thing that kept me going was my girlfriend who I loved and she helped me through everything, till my mother sent me away for 8 months breaking us up and I lost her. I got back from my boy school and once again became addicted to very heavy drugs, I fought with my mom still and she constantly told me how she wished I died instead of my older sister. I’m completely lost, I feel like I’m going to explode inside and the only release I get is from drugs and cutting myself, I abnormally skinny and learned to hate the world. I need help cause I’m scared just a cut wont be enough, I need to escape from this world. Please give me some sort of advice, I’m desperate.

A: When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves. Viktor Frankl

You have a great deal of resilience even in the face of tremendous loss and addiction. Your background information says that you are a sophomore in college. Even through all of this you have, somehow, managed to stay in school. The world didn’t deal you the best situation, but that doesn’t mean you do not have a choice in how you respond. The first thing is to clean up the addictions. You know that nothing gets better until that is under control. For this I recommend Narcotics Anonymous – a 12-step program specifically designed to help with serious drug addiction. There are meetings in nearly every county in nearly every state. Google them and find the closest open meeting near you.

Secondly, I would take advantage of the fact you are in college. College counselors are typically very well versed in coping with the college population and drug use. This counseling combined with NA is the first step out of hell.

The part of you that wrote us is the part that believes something can change. I would follow Frankl’s advice and accept the challenge.

Daniel J. Tomasulo, Ph.D., TEP, MFA, MAPP is a graduate of the Masters of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) program at the University of Pennsylvania and works as Martin Seligman's assistant instructor there. He is a licensed psychologist specializing in group psychotherapy and psychodrama and is the author of the highly acclaimed Confessions of a Former Child: A Therapist’s Memoir. Visit www.formerchild.com for more information. He also writes for Psych Central's Ask the Therapist column and the Proof Positive blog.